One of the biggest storylines of the 2026 Major League Baseball season will be the implementation of the Automatic Ball/Strike System, allowing players to challenge umpires' ball and strike calls on the fly. Just don't expect to see Atlanta Braves ace Chris Sale tapping his head any time soon.
"I will never challenge a pitch. I will never do it. I won't do it," Sale said Friday, according to Justin Felder of Fox 5 Sports. When asked why, Sale replied: "Because I'm not an umpire. That's their job. I'm a starting pitcher - I've never called balls and strikes in my life."
Sale, a three-time strikeout champion, isn't against the ABS system entirely. But he feels that catchers, who are now more adept at framing pitches than ever before, may be better equipped to make those kinds of judgment calls. The 36-year-old, who once famously said that he'd never shaken off a catcher, has total trust that his backstops will know when and how to use the system to his team's advantage.
"Catchers nowadays, the way they catch the ball, the way they receive, they make them all look like strikes," Sale said. "And again, I'm a starting pitcher and I'm greedy. I like pitches that are on the corner that might be a little off. In the heat of the moment, especially (when) you throw a good pitch, you got Murph (Braves catcher Sean Murphy) or Baldy (Drake Baldwin) or whoever back there and they kind of catch it the right way. They make a lot of balls look like strikes, and I don't want to take away one of those challenges that might be needed later on in the game."
Sale added that he's "fine to kind of keep dealing with" the human element of umpires occasionally missing calls.
The ABS system has been used in the minors for several seasons and was tested with big-leaguers in spring training last year. Teams will be given two challenges per game, but only pitchers, catchers, or batters can request a challenge, and they must do so within two seconds of the pitch being thrown. If a player challenges by tapping his head, a graphic will quickly be shown to indicate whether or not he was successful, and then the game will continue.
All teams will get one additional challenge in extra innings, even if they enter the 10th inning having used them up earlier in the game.
